The importance of Creativity in the classroom cannot be overstated. If you ignore your creative side in lesson planning as well as in other areas of your daily classroom practices, you might not be in favor of getting up and going to work in the mornings. Your students will most likely be bored with teaching due to uninteresting presentations, and some of your students might even become constantly disruptive.
However, when teachers unleash their creative side, they make their classroom a place where students desire to be and where students want to participate.
A Teacher Who Refused to be Creative
I friend of mine who taught fourth grade didn’t believe in creativity. He concentrated on presenting an image of sternness to send a message to potentially disruptive students.
But that strategy backfired when 90% of his class went into a rebellion mode. Students constantly refused to do work or listen to his mechanical lesson presentations. Certain students even complained to the principal about the boredom generated due to his noncreative teaching strategies.
Eventually, instead of answering the principal’s call to unleash his creative side, he gave up the job in the middle of the semester to another teacher.
Unleashing Creativity without Reservation
As teachers, if our most passionate desire is to transform the lives of our students, we must be willing to unleash our creative side without reservation. Education is not about us. It is for the betterment of our students via the knowledge and vision we instill within them.
The benefits we receive from unleashing our creative side in the classroom includes
- Heightened fun and excitement
- Greater interest and participation
- Accelerated Learning and Growth
John Gardner’s enormously popular book Multiple Intelligence taught me how to use creativity to meet the various needs of students. In his book, he discusses 7 bits of intelligence designed to accommodate the various learning styles of students. For example, some students learn better from listening to lesson plans integrated with music while other learn more effectively from lesson plans presented with lots of visuals.
The 7 Multiple Intelligences include:
- Visual-Spatial
- Bodily-kinesthetic
- Musical
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Linguistic
- Logical -Mathematical
You can learn the meaning of each concept by getting a copy of John Gardner’s book and reading it. But these creative teaching strategies will go a long way in helping make your lesson planning interesting as well as keeping your students engaged.
If you have traditionally taught your students via the same old boring, mechanical strategies year after year with unpleasant results, then it is time to commit to creativity and change. Dedicate yourself to unleashing your creative side.
Getting Started
The first thing we want to do is use our imaginative thinking to come up with innovative ideas or improve existing practices. To do this, we must look at what we are doing well and then look at the areas in which we need to improve.
The aim is to become a teacher who presents interesting, exciting and engaging lesson content as well as an educator who promotes creativity among students.
3 Strategies for generating creative Ideas
Brainstorming
It is one of the oldest methods for discovering innovative ideas. Sit down and write as quickly as possible whatever comes to your mind. There is no need to judge or condemn what you have written. Just write nonstop on how to improve on the areas in which you need to be more creative.
If you do this exactly the way it should be done, you will be amazed at some the creative ideas which you come up with. Most of the time, creativity doesn’t come off the top of your head, they must be earned via deep thinking.
Story Telling
Figure out ways in which you can incorporate stories in your lesson presentations. Students, as well as adults, love to hear goes stories. Stories break up the constant bombardment of concepts and information that may be contributing to student’s restlessness and boredom.
Sometimes, when students are tired and restless, I don’t go straight into the next lesson, I take out a book, call students to the carpet and read them a delightful story.
Better yet, if you can come up with an origin story related to the content in which you are teaching, you are hitting the ball out of the park and making a home run as far as bringing students to focus on an idea which will allow them to remember it forever.
Creativity Board
Last, get the students involve in unleashing their creative side. Introduce them to story boarding. Story boarding is he practice of getting everyone to come up with creative ideas and share them on a gigantic board in the classroom. You’ll be amazed by the ideas that some of your students generate, some of which may have never crossed your mind.
In participating in story boarding, students get to see how their ideas contribute to the betterment of their classroom, resulting in more appreciation for education, learning, and creativity.
Demonstrating your creative side will go a long way in re-exciting your student’s interest in education and perhaps making your classroom a model for the entire school.
